... , he served for longer than, say, Clement Attlee, David Lloyd George or Edward Heath, longer than James Callaghan and Neville Chamberlain put together and just a few months shy of Harold Macmillan, yet he made less impression than any of those figures even at the time.’ A fair point, although his elevation to the premiership certainly had Labour rattled, rightly as it turned out on election night two years later. 'The Conservatives have found their Attlee,' said Lord (Douglas) Jay at the time in my hearing, a statement given some weight by his having served as a Treasury Minister under Labour's first post-war premier. Major enjoyed not one but two periods of extraordinarily ...

... up the roots just as things are getting better and trust your nation's destiny to this extraordinary woman? Hardly a socialist question. Indeed, a conservative one. But it works. No, the nation rather comfortably replies, on the whole, we ain't. It was a victory for consensus politics and the British way, rather than for Labour. But Labour, the natural party of government, did it all right, with a 21-seat majority and another five years. Earlier that year, Margaret Thatcher had told a chum that if she lost the election, her party might sack her. And so it did. The gentle-natured baronets and vengeful Heathites blamed her for scare tactics ...

... fight the Russians. This was the same stance that he had taken with regard to Nazi Germany. Whereas in Animal Farm, the Soviet Union is shown as being as bad as the West, by Nineteen Eighty Four, the totalitarian danger has become overwhelming. This was not the only factor though. Orwell was a strong supporter of the Labour government right up until his death. He was very critical of it for not being radical enough, arguing on one occasion that a United Socialist States of Europe was the only thing worth fighting for, but he believed it was the best that was possible at the time. It was this government that had set up the IRD to ...

... else has offered me any material on the subject). When this venture began in 1983 there was hardly any reporting on the British secret state and it seemed worthwhile to collect what fragments we could. Three things have changed. There are now mountains of information in the major media; there is no point in pushing this material at the Labour Party in the hope of getting political action because 8 <www.alternet.org/personal-health/radiation-concerns-about- cellphones?page=0 %2C0> 9 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devra_Davis> 10 <www.huffingtonpost.com/devra-davis-phd/cell-phones-brain- cancer_b_3232534.html> 11 <http://www.viewdocsonline.com/document/6kn1ey> they will do nothing ...

... archetypal Blairite, a man apparently only concerned with power, money and being of service to the American Empire, and he was giving it all up. Had we all got him wrong? This was the man who had famously been exposed as not having any idea of the level of JobSeekers Allowance at the hustings during the campaign for the Labour Party leadership! And once he had lost that election decided to devote himself to making money, lots of money. In 2011-2012, he earned a modest £446,000 on top of his paltry £65,000 MP's salary. Oxford Analytica paid him £55,000 for eight days work and the venture capital outfit, ...

... (and wives) in the UK, a quarter were involved in 'undiplomatic activities'. How had this been allowed to happen? Some had few doubts:'[T ]he Prime Minister [Edward Heath] felt resentment towards his predecessor, Harold Wilson. Soviet espionage was, in Heath's view, only one of many issues the Labour government had handled badly between 1964 and 1970. Wilson and his colleagues, though well aware of the problem caused by increasing numbers of Soviet spies, [my italics] had done little to tackle it, principally to avoid disrupting Anglo-Soviet relations.’ It's that slander again! Thus the weirdly named operation FOOT (their capital letters, not mine ...

... do with that intelligence is unclear to me.) The second conclusion, for students of the British political system, is that real political power in the UK rests with the Prime Minister. When I became interested in the relationship between the intelligence and security services and the British political system in the late 1970s, it was believed on the Labour left that the intelligence and security services were all- powerful and unaccountable. They are still unaccountable in any real sense (their accountability to Parliament is notional) but the events of the past two years show that it is 'The Prime Minister wishes....’ which still commands absolute authority. 4 Timothy Garton-Ash, 'We were duped' ...

... and France. A considerable argument develops in the cabinet about these, led by James Callaghan who, by appealing to the trade union bloc vote and trade union-nominated MPs, sees taking an oppositionist stance as his opportunity to destroy the chances of Barbara Castle (who is promoting the proposals) succeeding Harold Wilson in any future leadership contest within the Labour Party. It soon becomes clear that Callaghan and the trade unions have mobilised a majority against Castle and Wilson. Although considering In Place of Strife to be much less comprehensive an approach than would be taken by a Conservative government, Edward Heath decides against a purely party political opposition to the scheme. An admirer of the West German industrial ...

... affair' of 1967, in which Pincher played a part, which is inadequate: a large element in it, involving the America NSA, the real subject matter, is backgrounded; and he underplays the extent to which some of the participants in the drama, notably Pincher and D-notice Committee secretary Lohan, were motivated by hatred of the Labour government. Prime Minister Wilson knew this, which explains his (failed, disastrous) attempt to tackle them head-on. And it really wasn't, as he has it, 'the British Watergate': that epithet must surely go to the anti-Labour operations of the 1970s, about which he says nothing. The 80 pages on Pincher and the ...

... Lobster special issue The Clandestine Caucus Anti socialist campaigns 1996 and operations in the slightly amended British Labour Movement since and expanded 2012 the war Robin Ramsay Part 1: Clearing the ground: the unions, socialism and the state U.S. influence after the war Post-war: private sector propaganda begins to regroup Common Cause and IRIS Part 2 Atlantic Crossings Anti-communism as a profession: The Information Research Department The subversion hunters and the social democrats in the 1970s The Crozier operations Was there a 'communist threat'? Books and articles cited The Clandestine Caucus Anti-socialist campaigns and operations in the British labour movement since the war. Robin Ramsay 1996/slightly amended and expanded 2012. Part 1 Clearing the ground ...